The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Tuesday, April 19, 2016

A brief article published a couple of years ago in Time magazine is still getting a lot of
attention. This piece, written by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, was
entitled “ ‘Time-Outs’ Are Hurting Your Child” (www.time.org/3404701/discipline-time-out-is-not-good/
). Siegel and Bryson began with the statement that painful experiences can
“change the structure of the brain” (though
they did not follow up by saying what behavioral or mood changes might result,
if any). They noted that emotional pain activates the same brain areas as
physical pain, commented that isolation can be emotionally painful, and
concluded that children who were temporarily isolated in “time-out” may be
damaged by the experience. They advised that “time-out” should give way to
“time-in” to give increased experience of warm affection.

Members of the Society of Clinical Child and
Adolescent Psychology, Division 53 of the American Psychological Association,
have been quite concerned about the inaccuracies in these statements. In a
press release headed “Outrageous claims regarding the appropriateness of Time
Out have no basis in science”, members of the division pointed out the highly
selective cherry-picking of neurological evidence that Siegel and Bryson made
use of, and noted that there were decades of research supporting the safety and
efficacy of “time out”, and little or none supporting “time in”.

The efforts of Siegel and Bryson to argue that “time
outs” or harmful were characterized by a common theme among pitchers of
woo-- that when the brain is “changed”
by events, that the outcome is of necessity a bad one. This ignores the fact
that the brain is constantly changing in structure and function because of
maturational factors, and is simultaneously being changed as memories of
experiences of all kinds are formed. The outcomes of these changes are
generally positive, so it is absurd to present “changes in the brain” as
evidence of harm. The first problem is to show that an experience (“time out”,
for instance) is regularly followed by undesirable behavioral or attitudinal
changes; if this had been accomplished, which it has not, the next step would
be to trace the brain events that cause the connection between the experience
and the bad outcome.

Like all other organisms, children change their
behavior in response to reinforcing events that follow behaviors. If something
nice happens after you do something, you become more likely to repeat that
action. Unfortunately, sometimes behaviors that other people do not want or
like get reinforced by accident. For example, most children will cut back on a
behavior that gets them scolded and yelled at, but a child who gets very little
attention may find that being focused on by an angry adult has reinforcing
power. It’s not the yelling itself, but the attention, that reinforces the
behavior. Similarly, a preschool child who acts up may find that although the
teacher does not reinforce the behavior, all the other kids are excited and
interested and attentive-- that
reinforces the behavior and makes it more likely to be repeated.

If children are “being bad” because an undesirable
behavior has been reinforced in the past, the unwanted behavior can be reduced
by making sure that it does not get reinforced. The purpose of “time out” is to prevent
reinforcement by removing the child temporarily from a potentially reinforcing
situation. If done consistently, this is an effective approach--- but ONLY if
the unwanted behavior has reached its present frequency because it was
reinforced in some way by the social environment.

If a behavior is self-reinforcing, like eating when
hungry, scratching an itch, or masturbating, unless it has also been socially
reinforced, “time-out” will not affect its frequency. Neither will “time-out”
reduce seizures or periods of inattentiveness due to neurological disorders, or
fearful behavior stemming from previous traumatic experiences, or
attention-getting behavior resulting from the absence of normal adult
attention. The reason to choose a method other than “time-out” is that a
specific behavior may not have developed as a result of reinforcement, and it
will not diminish as a result of non-reinforcement. Under those circumstances, “time-in”
and increased interaction with an adult may be helpful to a child who needs
social support in order to do his or her best.

“Time-out” is not always the best choice-- but this is not because it “changes the brain”
in some mysterious but threatening way.

P.S. Then there’s my two-year-old granddaughter, who
when sent to “time-out” trots off looking very pleased with herself as she does
just what her older brother is sent to do! Is this experiencing actually
reinforcing for her? Maybe, but after all she wasn’t so very naughty to begin
with…

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Anyone who has been watching American political
events this year will be aware of the reasons for the term “culture wars”.
We’re not just watching groups of people who happen to agree with each other
and not with their opposite numbers; we’re watching groups each bound together
by beliefs and practices, and each disapproving strongly of the other’s
positions. The beliefs and practices of each group are defined as cultures
because they are taught and learned by members whose group shares them. The
“war” part is unfortunately pretty obvious these days.

Although the United States is fortunately
multicultural, there are two broad groups (each a coalition of smaller groups)
that form the cultures now struggling in the political arena. The first of
these is a modernist, progressive, liberal group, consisting of the mainstream religious bodies
combined with the secular humanists, whose beliefs and practices are not very
different from those of the liberal churches. The second group is
traditionalist, fundamentalist, and conservative. As adults, the two groups
display strong differences in attitudes and preferred behaviors associated with
a variety of issues. For examples of differences in the beliefs of these two
groups, we can look at attitudes toward contraception and abortion, toward
same-sex marriage, and toward reports of global warming.

Not surprisingly, the modernist and traditionalist
groups each do their best to inculcate their beliefs and practices into
children growing up in their groups. But how do they do this? When do the
children begin to share the adult attitudes? Are modernist 5-year-olds and
fundamentalist 5-year-olds already very different in their thinking? Or does it
take years of teaching and cognitive development before differences are
evident? Gilbert and Sullivan claimed that “Every boy and every gal that’s born
into this world alive/ Is either a little liberAL or else a little
conservaTIVE”. Were they right?

These are not easy questions to answer, but some help
has been provided in a recent article (Jensen, L.E., & McKenzie, J. [2016].
The moral reasoning of U.S. evangelical and mainline Protestant children,
adolescents, and adults: A cultural-developmental study. Child Development, 87[2], 446-464; N.B., if you look at this paper—I
think the captions to figures 2 and 3 are reversed). Jensen and McKenzie
compared moral reasoning in members of two Presbyterian groups, the modernist
Presbyterian Church (USA) and the fundamentalist Presbyterian Church in America
(PCA). The first is a member of the National Council of Churches, the second a
member of the National Association of Evangelicals. (Although I mentioned
earlier that secular humanists might share a good deal with the modernist churches,
I want to point out that no secular humanists were included here, and the
results of this study may not apply to them as well.) Interviews about moral
judgments and reasoning were carried out with 60 members of each church, the
groups divided evenly into 7-12-year-olds, 13-18-year-olds, and adults ages
36-57. For example, at one point, interviewees were asked whether they could
tell about a time when they had an important experience involving a moral
issue—this might be a situation where they now think their actions were morally
right, or they may now seem morally wrong.

Of course most people find it difficult to explain
all the details of their moral reasoning and judgment, whether they think an
action is right or whether they think it’s wrong. Jensen and McKenzie worked
out some details of the interviewees’ thinking by analyzing issues and answers
on three dimensions. One was the age of the participant, a piece of information
that would help establish developmental change in moral reasoning. A second was
whether the moral issue being discussed was a private experience (like drug
use, behavior toward friends, theft, or volunteering) or had to do with public
sphere (like giving money to panhandlers, divorce, or capital punishment). The
third dimension had to do with the ethical perspective taken. The authors
referred to the three possibilities as follows: The Ethic of Autonomy focuses
on harm to the self and the interests of the self and the needs of other
individuals (as unique persons, not simply as group members). These moral
decisions attempt to protect the self and other individuals, and this type of
moral reasoning begins in early childhood and persists into adulthood. The
Ethic of Community makes moral decisions on the basis of duties toward group
needs, initially the family and later schools and even broader social
organizations, whose harmony is seen as important. This type of moral reasoning
is minimal in early childhood and may gradually increase through adolescence
and into adulthood. Finally, the Ethic of Divinity stresses the role of
spiritual or religious entities, with moral decisions involving obedience to a
god’s authority, natural law, or spiritual purity. The last ethic has received
much less research attention than the others.

Jensen and McKenzie’s interviewees used the Ethic of
Autonomy most as children and decreased this perspective somewhat through
adolescence and into adulthood. The Community perspective increased for
everyone from childhood into adulthood.

The great difference between the groups was in the
use of the Ethic of Divinity—rare even among evangelical children, almost nonexistent
among modernist children, and increasing with age through adolescence, but by
far most common among fundamentalist adults thinking about public moral issues
(e.g., same-sex marriage). Mainline
adults, though less likely to use the Ethic of Divinity at all, applied it more
often in the private than in the public sphere. A major difference between
modernist and fundamentalist adults was in the appeal to scriptural authority,
with Bibles being used and on display in fundamentalist households but rarely
referenced by modernists.

Jensen and
McKenzie pointed out that the two “armies” in the current culture wars are not
committed to the same “moral lingua franca” and therefore find themselves
unable to carry out any real discussion of their differences. This is not so
much a problem in childhood, when evangelical and mainline children tend to
share the Ethic of Autonomy, but looms large after adolescence, when
evangelicals emphasize the Ethic of Divinity, a perspective rarely taken by
modernists.

That such different moral languages are spoken by
the two major groups may be one of the
reasons for the current intense emphasis on angry emotion in politics. Neither
understands what the other is saying, and the discussion is regrettably reduced
to mime. Can we generalize this view to an explanation of world-wide conflicts?
I think that’s possible—but such thinking is only a baby step toward resolution on any stage.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.